Healthcare Matters

SCM professionals love the cloud. And rightfully so, as SCM may well be the killer application. What follows is a high level primer for SCM professionals who might be well served to know a little bit more about the challenges faced by their IT departments –who are working hard to hold down the fort amidst the proliferation of cloud based apps deployed in a variety of environments, including mobile.

Mobile healthcare applications need a management platform. Obviously, open, flexible system designs are best, because requirements will span Apple and Android devices (at least). With new and highly practical applications being released on what seems like a daily basis and the power to develop custom applications becoming commonplace, providers need to make sure their platform can accommodate quick deployment, regardless of operating system.

Any successful mobile platform will rapidly grow to include the need to integrate with a variety of back-end applications. Being able to integrate a mobile platform with such applications (e.g. making sure that data can be shared so that billing, registration and scheduling systems are properly synchronized) is absolutely essential. Along with clinical and departmental systems, if mobile apps can’t use them effectively, then many of us have a right to ask the question: “what’s the point?” On the other hand, IT professionals have every right to ask: “what’s the hurry?”

Simple, but essential mobile platform system features:

• Data Persistency –Start off with mobile apps that only download relevant data to the device when there is an active connection to the back-end system. There is no need for patient-data to reside on the mobile device.  In fact, there is no need for the patient-data to reside on the mobile server. Let it stay where it belongs –in the back end systems.  While it is understood that read-only access has it limits, explore those limits before making a decision to expand to write access.

• Existing Access and User Authorization policies should be enforced, not re-written. Strengthening security for one comprehensive policy is always the best way to go. Access logging and other typical security/audit provisions should be ported and/or replicated in your mobile management environment –not newly created. To be crystal clear, if your current back-end systems don’t enforce a logon and logoff procedure, then create the policy and enforce the same for your entire enterprise, including your mobile users.

Whatever mobile server platform you select, make sure that it is fully decoupled from your back-end systems. Stay away from logically separated add-ons. Maintain a physical separation.

Hope this helps a little. It’s in everyone’s interest to develop comprehensive security policies that can fully service and be equally enforced across all computing environments.

—Tom Finn